Whenever you call an emergency response number, police want to track your location so that they know where send responders. During the time when most people relied on landline phones, it was easy for police and emergency response units to find the location that the call was being made from and to be able to arrive in time. [...]
Gone are the days of clicking a Facebook link and hoping that the innocent-looking website your friend sent you to isn’t anything dangerous or inappropriate. Thanks to Facebook teaming up with the security firm Websense, all of the links that you click on from Facebook will now be scanned in real-time for anything that can harm your computer, expose your personal information, or mentally scar you. [...]
You may have heard about the Conficker Worm from way back in 2008. It caused quite a scare as it was infecting a huge amount of computers, was able to spread on it’s own, and no one knew how to stop it. Well, at this point this worm isn’t as popular or thought of as much, especially as there are now patches and protections from it, however, this worm is still alive and well with an estimated 12 million computers under its control. [...]
Facebook is planning on rolling out yet another feature which will make sharing that much easier for its users. However, security specialists are concerned that this new feature might make the sharing of personal information too easy, leading to an increase in hacking and harassment. [...]
Car owners read carefully: if your car was ever signed up for OnStar, even if that means you might have bought a pre-owned vehicle where the previous owner was an OnStar subscriber, the car tracking and communications service is about to start tracking your vehicle once again. [...]
Internet security company McAfee conducts an annual study that classifies the top celebrities that might be harmful to your computer’s health. By harmful we don’t mean that the celebrities themselves might wreak havoc on your system, but instead that searching for websites or images of these people might bring up malware-loaded websites specifically created to look like innocent celebrity content. [...]
GPS accuracy and lock-on speed depends on how many GPS satellites have a clear view of your device at any moment of the day, however, what most people aren’t aware of is that there are plenty of non-GPS satellites oribiting Earth that are capable of doing the exact same job of providing location. It only makes sense that U.S. cell providers would eventually tap into these additional satellites. [...]
Lately, we have been hearing a lot about people getting into legal trouble for recording on-duty police officers with their cell phones or camcorders. Not only are these people being harassed, having their cameras and other recording equipment confiscated, but in some cases they’ve been arrested and jailed. The interesting thing here is that these people were not breaking any laws, but were in fact entitled to recording police by the first amendment. This right was confirmed by a federal appellate court last week. [...]
Surveillance security systems and smart DVRs have come a long way in the past decade with the invention of features such as motion detection, scheduled recording, and live video streaming over the web. The lastest development, however, not only surpasses these features in usefulness, but downright puts their technological breakthroughs to shame. [...]
With Hurricane Irene behind us, there are billions of dollars in damages left for the victims, insurance agencies, and the government to pay to get things back to normal. In fact, Hurricane Irene is proving to be one of the 10 costliest catastrophes in the nation’s history; so it makes perfect sense that there would be charities and foundations springing up to help everyone get back on their feet. The FBI warns us to be careful of exactly who or which charities we hand our hard-earned money over to. [...]
The days of dreading being tagged in embarrassing Facebook photos and rushing home to untag yourself are now thankfully gone. After receiving countless requests from users to add this feature, Facebook has just announced that it will give users the option of having to approve tagged photos before they are posted on their profile. However, with this privacy update, Facebook also decided to loosen up on who gets to tag you, making it possible for complete strangers to tag you in photos. [...]
Ian Magee, a 63-year-old man from Somerset, UK, was getting fed up with drivers speeding on his street, doing close to 60 mph on the 30 mph road. So he decided to get creative and take the matter into his own hands. [...]
As if online advertisers weren’t tracking users’ activity enough, we now have another online tracking tool to worry about – the supercookie. Unlike a regular browser cookie, which collects a user’s browsing history, giving websites and advertisers a way to see what a web user has been doing online (but also gives you the benefit of not having to keep logging into the same site over and over again every time you navigate to a different website), this new form of cookie collects all the information secretly, and also unlike a regular cookie, is much harder to locate and delete. [...]
We often hear about how dangerous using cell phones is while driving; but in reality, the situation is even worse then we previously thought. In fact, the scary statistics that contributed to previously reported distracted driving numbers are only a fraction of a larger, more dangerous portait. [...]
